That evening I inquired among my acquaintances if there was any one who would care to accompany me.  If so I would give them passage to Yuma, or to the Gulf of California in Mexico, if they wished it.  But no one could go, or those who could, wouldn’t.  One would have thought from the stories with which I was regaled, that the rapids of the Grand Canyon were below Needles, and as for going to the Gulf, it was suicide.  I was told of the outlaws along the border, of the firearms and opium smugglers, who shot first and questioned afterward, and of the insurrectos of Lower California.  The river had no real outlet to the ocean, they said, since the break into Salton Sea, but spread over a cane-brake, thirty miles or more in width.  Many people had gone into these swamps and never returned, whether lost in the jungles or killed by the Cocopah Indians, no one knew.  They simply disappeared.  It was all very alluring.

My preparations, the next day, were few.  I had included a sleeping bag with my baggage.  It would come in equally handy whether I went down on the Colorado or up into the Coast Range.  A frying-pan, a coffee-pot a few metal dishes and provisions for a week were all I needed.  Some one suggested some bent poles, and a cover, such as are used on wagons to keep off the sun.  This seemed like a good idea; and I hunted up a carpenter who did odd jobs.  He did not have such a one, but he did have an old wagon-seat cover, which could be raised or dropped at will.  This was even better, for sometimes hard winds sweep up the river.  The cover was fastened to the sides of the boat.  The boat, meanwhile, had been thoroughly scrubbed.  It looked clean before, but I was not going to take any chances at carrying Indian live-stock along with his boat.  My surplus baggage was sent on to Los Angeles, and twenty-four hours after I had landed in Needles, I was ready to embark.

My experience in camping trips of various sorts has been that the start from headquarters occupies more time than any similar preparation.  Once on the road, things naturally arrange themselves into some kind of a system, and an hour on the road in the evening means several hours gained the next morning.  Added to this, there are always a number of loafers about railroad towns, and small things have a way of disappearing.  With this in mind, I determined to make my start that evening, and at 7 P.M. on the 23d of May, 1913, I embarked on a six to eight mile an hour current, paced by cottonwood logs, carried down by the flood from the head waters in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado.

When sailing on the unruffled current one did not notice its swiftness—­it sped so quietly yet at the same time with such deadly intent—­until some half submerged cottonwood snags appeared, their jagged, broken limbs ploughing the stream exactly like the bow of a motor-driven boat, throwing two diverging lines of waves far down the stream.  One would almost think the boat was motionless, it raced so smoothly,—­and that the snags were tearing upstream as a river man had said, the day before, “like a dog with a bone in his teeth.”  A sunken stone-boat, with a cabin half submerged, seemed propelled by some unseen power and rapidly dwindled in the distance.